If you were wondering, I am aware of the current bullshit that substack is up to and the fact that various creators are considering actions in response. I don’t make any money from this newsletter, so on some level this isn’t about what I do, but also I don’t want to stand back and let a platform behave in ways it shouldn’t without facing consequences. I don’t know what I’m going to do, if I’m going to do anything, but for transparency’s sake you should know this is on my radar.
Also, I have never charged for this newsletter, and the point of it isn’t to make money, but if you do feel like giving me money for some reason my venmo is BessMPLS. I just got new glasses and shelled out the extra 80 bucks to get blue light coating, and then I had to buy a book of poetry about My Chemical Romance because it was four in the morning and I couldn’t sleep and needed to feel alive.
PICTURE OF THE CAT
WHAT I WATCHED YESTERDAY
In preparation for the Snyder cut coming out on Thursday I decided to catch up on his previous DC Extended Universe films which I had avoided on purpose up to this point. They are not good. I don’t like Superman very much as a character, and Man of Steel is interesting because it manages to avoid most of the things I find unappealing while still being a bad movie. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a better movie because I love Batman. More movies should have Batman in them, he’s just the best. I like him best when he’s collecting orphans and struggling to explain his feelings, but I like basically any version of Batman, and strangely this was not an exception.
The worst thing about these movies is the action sequences. They are boring and bad to look at. It’s a lot of people hitting each other through grey CGI spaces. Lots of big budget action movies have similar flaws, but these are real bad. I’m having a hard time describing how bad they were because honestly I spent most of the fight scenes looking at my phone, they were that painfully dull.
The best thing about these movies is that Zack Snyder has a real take on these characters. He isn’t taking the obvious route into these characters. I still think Superman is boring, but Snyder tried to make him a three dimensional character. He did this by going dark and existential, and we can argue about whether that’s a good choice — my favorite Superman story, Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman went in the absolute opposite direction. But it isn’t just “here is a baby, he’s super, he’s a farm bay, yay America.” I like the serious Kryptonian world building that he gets into — it maybe doesn’t make sense in a Superman blockbuster, but it looks cool, and characters are making fighting over their morals. And in Batman v Superman he makes real choices to create a non-obvious version of Batman! I’m not convinced by Ben Affleck’s performance, but I love the idea of an Old Batman, I love how we are only given hints as to how he reached this point, the burnt out Wayne Manor, Jason’s suit in a case. Jeremy Irons’s take on Alfred is a lot flintier than Michale Caine’s, or how he’s usually portrayed in the comics, and I really enjoyed it.
The sequence I enjoyed the most is where Bruce dreams? Hallucinates? Is given a premonition? Of a world where Superman has become too powerful, and he is part of a resistance movement to bring down a fascist alien god. This part of the movie looks really cool, I’m excited to find out about this world. I wish Snyder had made a whole self contained movie set in this world instead of the movie he made, which is too busy shuffling pieces around to set up the future Justice League to have a real heart of its own.
Watching these movies made me think about Patrick Willems’s video about King Arthur and Robin Hood, and how the reason why new reboots of these properties fail is because they’re all trying to do winking new sideways takes on the stories that don’t work because they assume the audience already cares about the characters and it’s been too long since there was a straightforward film version to get people invested. He contrasts this to superhero movies, of which there have consistently been new versions that are almost all setting up the story and telling you why you should care. I’m a real nerd who’s read a lot of comics, and knows way too much about Batman and his family, but I’m not an outlier in thinking that movies with Batman are cool, I’d love to see any movie with Batman. The audience knows the origin story, we don’t need to rehash that every time, let’s try new things! I really respect that Snyder made bold choices in how to approach these characters, even though the resulting films do not work for me. I really wonder what would have happened if he had been given a chance to make a DC movie without the burdens of a franchise to set up. Some of the most interesting recent Superhero films are the ones that have the least to do with their greater universes. Birds of Prey is barely related to the greater DCEU, and it rocks. Joker is a turd, but there’s so much potential in taking an element of a greater superhero universe and making a single self contained film that is allowed to make weird choices. Sometimes the movies would be bad (Joker) but that movie still made a ton of money and won too many awards, so we might as well keep trying it. It certainly seems to be a smarter approach than the made-by-committee house style approach that succeeds with Marvel and utterly failed in the Justice League movie.
It’s funny — I didn’t like either of these movies, but I’m still pretty excited to see the Snyder cut. There are going to be long boring action sequences, but I want to see how he builds out this world. I don’t think it’s going to be good, but it’s going to have Batman, doing Batman things. What more do I want from a movie?
Then Gus got home from work, and we put on Aquaman which is so fun and weird. It’s also a kind of bad movie — the plotting is very clumsy, and the action sequences aren’t great. But it’s got a sense of wonder, and a sense of humor. Julie Andrews is the voice of a giant sea creatures. John Rhys Davies is the voice of a character called The Brine King — I love the Bring King. An octopus plays the drums! I don’t need a movie to really make sense if it’s doing so much other cool stuff.
SONG OF THE DAY
This is one of my all time favorite songs, and it came up on shuffle while I was writing, and we don’t need an excuse to listen to this song, it is just the best. Hail Satan!
🎶🎵➕🗻➕🐐=❤️
The Mountain Goats have a nice sound! Good concert!!!